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duck newton is seventeen in oversized flannel and scuffed-up doc martens and a name that doesn’t quite fit right. he always appears slightly sickly, plagued by a constant hacking cough that comes as a byproduct of cheap weed mixed with chronic asthma. it’s a small price to pay, he tells juno divine one night when they’re smoking in the clearing out by the trailer park, after he’s managed to catch his breath for long enough to take a couple puffs of his inhaler. she rolls her eyes, snatching the joint from his hand and taking a drag of her own.
duck’s hair hangs just above his shoulders, as short as his mother will let him cut it. he is seventeen in ripped denim and grass-stained knees and baggy clothes that almost swallow him whole. he is seventeen and hurting, seventeen and hiding, and his mother still calls him baby girl.
she knows something is off; duck reckons she probably always has. she’s written it off as him being a tomboy for as long as she can, but he’s not a kid anymore, and he’s found that as soon as you start growing tits, tomboy turns very quickly into dyke.
duck newton is seventeen, and he can’t decide whether dyke is better or worse than tranny. whether tranny is better or worse than baby girl.
his mother is trying. he wishes she’d stop. she dresses his baby sister in pale pink with lace trim, like maybe if she doesn’t let this one kick a soccer ball around, she’ll turn out normal. janie’s six now, finally putting duck’s old barbie dolls and shit to use. he hopes she grows up normal–kepler doesn’t seem to have room for anything less.
duck’s always felt like his skin doesn’t quite fit right. he’s always felt like he doesn’t quite fit right—not that he belongs somewhere else, but that everyone around him thinks he does. kepler is his home, but the people here are not. duck’s always been a loner, and that’s fine. he can smoke half a joint with juno divine and break into the old abandoned convenience store on the outskirts of town with vicky wilson and win a mean game of street hockey against zeke owens, but there’s always going to be something about him that sets him apart. he’s always going to be strange. an odd duck, his mom might say, if she ever let any semblance of his nickname slip through her lips.
the name starts as a joke; something juno says when they’re parked in the high school lot on an august night, laying in the bed of her truck after the end-of-summer rager at zeke’s house.
“i don’t really like parties,” he admits, staring up at the stars. he catches sight of the big dipper, the only constellation he’s ever been able to reliably identify; traces its stars with his gaze.
“it shows,” juno tells him, eighteen years young in a green army jacket and big, clunky combat boots, unapologetically herself in a way that duck doesn’t know if he’ll ever be. her wide array of piercings glint in the summer moonlight as she tells him, still slightly buzzed from the party, “you’re like a baby duck.”
“what?”
“like a… like a duckling, y’know? like a fuckin’—like in fuckin’ honors psych with the baby ducks, y’know? how they, like, y’know, they follow their mom duck around? that’s like how you are at parties. but i’m…i’m the mom duck and you’re the baby. you follow me around like a baby duck, y’know?”
“not really,” he tells her. “i didn’t take honors psych.”
“well, the ducks,” she starts to explain, “the ducks, they imprint on their mom and they trail behind her wherever she goes, right? even if they don’t know where they’re going.”
“and i’m like a duck?”
“yeah,” she says. “a little duckling… sweet baby duck. we should call you… we should call you duck. duck. duck newton.”
“for real?” he asks. something in his chest flutters at the new name.
“i don’t know,” juno admits. “i’m drunk.”
“i would like that,” he tells her quietly. “i would—i don’t like my real name. it doesn’t—it doesn’t feel right sometimes. i mean, most of the time.”
juno hums in understanding. “it’s always been a little too girly for your whole vibe,” she observes.
duck meets her eyes, which shine with something he can’t quite identify. can she tell? does she know? is there something visibly and unmistakably wrong threaded into my dna?
he thinks about telling her the truth; gets almost halfway there before his vocal chords freeze up and a flash of pure panic sends a shiver down his spine. he takes a breath.
“duck newton,” he says out loud for the first time. the name feels more his than he ever knew a name could; it feels like he’s discovered a long-forgotten puzzle piece behind the radiator in the basement and finally clicked it into place where it belongs.
“it suits you,” juno tells him, and he can’t quite hide the smile that comes over him at her words of validation.
the next time he sees her, she greets him with a gentle punch on the arm and a “heya, duck,” and the name catches on quick. sarah from his biology class writes their names on the top of their lab report before they turn it in; sarah drake & duck newton, honors biology #2. “hey duck, how’s it goin’?” asks mr. thacker when they cross paths walking through the monongahela. “hell of a shot, duck!” shouts vicky wilson across the abandoned mall when he makes the winning goal in their christmas-break field hockey tournament.
is this how jane feels, he wonders, when someone calls her by the name their mother gave her? is this the feeling of rightness a name is supposed to bring?
duck newton is seventeen in oversized flannel and scuffed-up doc martens, with an embarrassingly weak pair of lungs and a nickname that fits like a well-worn leather jacket. in three months, he will take a pair of kitchen shears to his hair and let scraggly locks and split ends fall into the sink, and it will be lopsided but it will be wonderful, and he’ll sneak out to the barbershop to get it fixed up before his mother can lay eyes on what he’s done. six months later, he will get drunk off cheap beer in order to give himself the courage he needs to explain to juno just how wrong he’s always felt in his own skin, and a couple hours after that, he’ll puke up all that liquid courage with his secret still heavy in his chest, making a vow to try again tomorrow. it will take him another week and a half to tell her the truth, but when he does, she’ll just smile. yeah, that makes sense, she’ll tell him, and he’ll feel as free as he did that day in the high school parking lot.
next year, a regal silhouette from a far-flung planet will call him by his name, taking her place as the first entity in his life who has never known him as anything else. the year after that, his mother will call him duck for the first time. in a couple of decades, only kepler’s old-timers will remember the ghost he used to be.
now, though, he is duck newton, seventeen years old, oversized flannel and scuffed-up doc martens, and though he doesn’t know it yet, he is well on his way to becoming the man he is destined to be.